by Richard Lutz
Now let me get it straight because things are moving fast.
The American secret services, such as the National Security Agency, peer into innocent people’s lives just in case they do something wrong sometime in the future; Google and Facebook deny in v-e-r-y careful language that they do not allow the spy boys access in such limiting legalese that you suspect something’s not right; a whistleblower explains why he revealed the abuses of e-surveillance; the UK secret service spooks at GCHQ deny they ever would touch illegally-acquired American spywork no matter how unsullied and..
Today UK Foreign Secretary Wm Hague says in the House of Commons: well, we’re very careful about whose emails we tap, and yes, well maybe…we do peek into US acquired muck but it gets a very strict OK from…well, our secret service boys. But I can’t tell you more.
And so it goes. Around and around. But one thing that is straightforward is that the ever evolving digi-world is porous, rotten with governmental spyware and open to monumental abuse that corrodes civil rights, ignores privacy laws- not just in the US but around the world-= and steps on the spine of democracy.
Now let’s start and stop at the top.
Because this invidious surveillance, which can touch all of us, is on President Obama’s watch. And unfortunately , he is acquiring quite a little track record that would do a Tea Party acolyte proud when it comes to national defence and and international affairs.
Let’s leave the e-spyng aside because we’ve dealt with it. Here are some others that need studying. Though the president is hopefully getting tough on domestic gun crime, his targeting of people by drone attacks shows his predilection towards violence from the skies.
Somewhere, it seems, there is a gap here between stopping Gloch gunfire in Detroit and pilotless air attacks in Pakistan. These policies stem from the same place- the White House whose spokesmen and policy makers seem to speak two ways out of the same mouth. Stop street gun murders but let it rip from 20,000 feet above somewhere far away.
This hypocritical attitude comes home to roost with the Guantanamo Bay prisoners- some of whom have been locked up for a decade now. But it is a not an international problem from the dead end of Bushville any more. But a current domestic one. These men languish in an incarcerated no-man’s land because the US judicial system just doesn’t want to handle it and the American administration doesn’t want to deal with it by either charging these prisoners from a decade old war or release them and shut down the Cuban prison as promised by Obama when he first took office.
The infringement of civil liberties, the hideous drone attacks that have kiiled 176 children alone in Pakistan and the failure to deal with a prison that stands outside any law may be the failed legacy that Barack Obama takes with him from the White House. It is a legacy that should have stopped with George W. Bush. And it still goes on.